Author: Liljumper

It’s almost Christmas, and I can’t help reflecting on my notions of home. In German there is a concept of the Heimat and means your home. It doesn’t really mean your home where you live now, but a nostalgic home, maybe a homeland you left, etc. That’s a bit of how I feel. I have made more new mini homes in places, but it will always come back to, and feel ‘at home’ at my Heimat where I grew up. There are tons of things that are not perfect about it, the bugs, the spiders…that’s basically it, but it will always be that nostalgic home. Regardless of where I call home, where I register my address, what my billing address is, there will always be that home. That Heimat for me. Nothing will ever compare and I don’t think it should. They shouldn’t compete for what to be my ‘true home’, because there’s already a clear winner. So it’s okay that they aren’t the same, or even close, because it will never compare to my Heimat. Nothing will replace it and nothing will ever be the same.

And that’s okay. It’s all a part of growing, moving, and changing. You don’t replace something to try to make it the same as what you left, they’re different. Just like my life is different here, my home is different here.

But Heimat, you remain always in my heart, my bones, and my thoughts.

Where is your Heimat?

Sometimes it just feels too much. Sometimes it just feel likes I gave up too much. Sometimes I don’t know who I am. Sometimes, moments like this, it just fills up the void with resentment and anger.

I know this moment passes, that this is just a lack of clarity. A blip or a bubble and that it’s not how I feel all the time. (But let’s be real, if it was how I felt all the time, wouldn’t that be an even scarier thought?)

Sometimes it just feels like nothing can compare to my life before and that this choice fills me up with so much resentment that I can never get back. I have made the choice no matter what the motivation or feeling and I can never get it back to before I did.

But sometimes it just feels like too much. Like too much has changed and too much has been lost.

This post seems so depressing and sad, but it’s a blip of overwhelming.

The holiday season brings up all this nostalgia for home. I’m one of the few people not returning home, and it just makes me long for something I can’t have. And so it brings about these feelings of too much resulting in too much resentment.

This too shall pass.

Credit to Othello.

I don’t know how many people are familiar with Othello, but it’s a line from the play from Othello demanding proof of his wife, Desdomona’s infidelity. He suspects it, and so when they give him her handkerchief he believes them. He believes them because he suspects it and see it.

Seeing is believing for Othello.

And it got me thinking about the times when we suspect something and only see it.

I talked in a previous post about betrayal, and sometimes people look for it. They suspect it and so they see it. You expect to get hurt, to be left, to be lied to, and then you see it. I’m not saying they don’t exist, but without second guessing, our suspicions are confirmed. And the sad part is they confirm that reality for us. Because we ‘see’ it we are more likely to expect it in the future.

If we are stuck in that loop, how do we escape?

Do we expect nothing? Approach everything with a blank slate? I don’t think I can and I haven’t even lived that long! It’s hard to pretend you don’t have those expectations, fears, and pain. How do you do that?

You expect people to disappoint you, to belittle you, to never reach up to your expectations and they never do. As with all idealizations they are unattainable and unrealistic. And so the cycle begins. The idealizations are impossible, so everyone is doomed to fail.  And what happens to you?

You live your life in skepticism, cynicism, and doubt.

I don’t think that’s a way to live.

I know these posts frequently start off sad and end with: well this is the way life is, sometimes it sucks, you just gotta persevere and fight it.

It’s hard, but I feel like that is what I do say. Things suck. People disappoint you, they hurt you, they make you feel like you can never get up again. But you do. You pick yourself up and you move forwards.

I guess I am just saying, if it feels like people are constantly disappointing you, just take a moment to look at what you ‘see’.

This title seems so sad and as I write it, I am hit with the morbidity of the truth.

But I had a thought the other day about this. We were learning about in class about how love is riddled with fear. Fear that our intended will not return the love and then fear we will lose that love.

I think that’s pretty spot on, but even more than that, I think it applies pretty well to being happy.

Because once you’re totally happy, if you ever can be, you know what it feels like to not be happy, and there is the fear of going back. Because where do you go when you are totally happy? Is happy the same as satisfied? Content? Fulfilled?

I guess we just learn to live with that constant fear and not go crazy. Not stay up at night fearing the loss of our love. We learn to cope and adapt. But isn’t it strangely ironic how the “happiest” and “best” and “most fulfilling” things are tied to such deep fears?

I have talked a bit about dreams before, but I wanted to talk some more about it now.

Dreams are dangerous.

For so many reasons.

There is always the fear of not being able to achieve the dream, of setting your goals so high just to fall, maybe not among the clouds, but to the ground.

There’s also the fear that once you get to the dream, it is lacking. That it isn’t what you thought it would be, and it wouldn’t be would it? The image is always prettier than the reality I think.

But finally, and what really gets me, is the fear that I won’t be enough. The dream is a test of yourself, what you can do. And what if the basic bare truth is that you don’t have it? That despite your aspirations, you can never get there because you are you? You can’t really change it, you can try, but maybe you just can’t. And isn’t that the scariest of all? Doesn’t that expose the most dangerous truth?

I think humans have a propensity for change, and so I don’t know if you could ever find out you really aren’t enough and can’t get there, but it will still come when a moment arises and you feel you aren’t. And I think that is the scariest of all.

Last week I had to find a new phone. Well I didn’t have to find one, but my old one was not only living on borrowed time, but also a ticking time bomb (one dressed as a cute cat, but a ticking one nonetheless).

It was really hard to find one, not because of the choices, there are choices abound, but because of the actual choices. There are so many different models of phones and it’s so difficult to choose. The performance versus the specifications versus the size. It’s so hard, plus the system here is different from what I’m used to where I only have a limited choices. Now I have any choices, bound by money of course, but could pick any. There are a lot of different reasons for this, and I ultimately like it.

Despite the amount of choices I have, there was also the nature of the choice. I have always had my parents to double check me and to bounce ideas off, now it’s completely different. They can advise me, but it’s ultimately my choice and my wallet that feels the brunt (first).

So there’s a finality and fear. There’s a finality when I swipe, or in this case stick, my card into the machine, but also a fear throughout the whole process. There’s a fear of picking the wrong phone, of doing something wrong, or dropping it, and of disappointing my parents with my choices. After I bought the phone, it wasn’t an instant sense of relief, but apprehension and a little fear. Fear I made the wrong choice, fear I did something wrong.

And so I guess the most difficult part wasn’t even finding the choice, but the pressure to find the right choice. But the fear and feelings I had associated with the choices, I realized, are just fears with choices in general. There will always be, at least, a small part of fear and apprehension and also finality.

That’s just the nature of choices and there’s really no other choice but to live with it…oh and live with the choices I have made.

Today I knit a scarf. I looked up a Youtube video and I thought, ‘oh I can’t’ and ‘what if I mess up?’ and then I thought, ‘let’s just do it’. And I did. I’ll take a photo later and add it to this blog post, but there’s something reassuring about life when you think, I can’t, but then go ahead and do it.

Pats on the back for me. I want to shout on the roof top, “I did it! I didn’t think I could, but I did, now I am a finger scarf knitting addict and want to make everyone I know a scarf, MUHAHAHhaha”. I want people to look at my scarf and both think, wow that looks really professional and wonder with astonishment, did she make that? I want them to ask me, after saying they think it looks fabulous, and then for me to say yes, and their mouths to drop from astonishment.

I may be being a bit silly, but it’s how I feel.

I almost feel like this mini victory has been a victory over my human condition.

So here’s to me, who will celebrate tonight by trying to set up my new phone with a glass of Fruchtsecco…before I finger knit at least two more scarfs tomorrow.

(Notice I said at least)

We were talking in class a while back about the power of the domestic and women’s roles. Mostly in the fact that if women are in the kitchen they are responsible for the taking care of the family. And this puts them in a position of authority, they can make food that is unhealthy or healthier, they can concoct broth to make someone feel better. They can control a lot of the way that the family and the home function.

I never thought about that.

Oh and they can poison the family as well. If they wanted to.

Just a thought.

I have a tendency to hoarde food. I hoard a lot of things because I am afraid when I need them, I won’t have them, but food especially.

In my apartment I have at least 2-3 extra flours and cans of things I might need. So I always have them when I need them. It’s a fear of not having what I need when I need it. It’s a fear of being unprepared, of wanting.

Because while they’re in my apartment, the desire for them is sated. For me, desire is a tricky thing. Sometimes I have used, let’s be real, a lot of the time I have used the rhetoric, I’ll eat it all now, so that I won’t have it/want it/be tempted by it later. And that’s how a lot of my food decisions can be made. It’s a fear, perhaps, of that overpowering desire. Because if I want it bad enough, and can’t have it, won’t that destroy me? make me upset?

Maybe it’s a realistic desire to want what I can have.

But maybe it goes back to that, maybe it goes back to when I was a baby and I learned the power and danger of desire.

Maybe desiring family or desiring shelter, love, warmth, was shown to be dangerous. Because perhaps it was wanting what I could never have, couldn’t dare to hope for. Because that’s a bit of how I feel about desire. For me they are never alluring, but fearful. It reminds me of the desire to want something I don’t know if I can have, it reminds me of disappointment and sadness.

Maybe this isn’t always all from my past, my childhood, but I think a lot of it is. Maybe that’s an excuse.

But regardless, this is how I feel.

I have a strange thought process to me. I have thoughts and I have to get them out. I need to put them on lists, almost like notes to get back to (in the case of blog posts), but mostly I just have them, they fly through my head and if I don’t put them down on paper, the chance of them being lost forever is quite high.

If they are super important, there’s a good chance they will come back, but usually it’s this way.

It’s almost like a compulsion. A semi violent need to expel the thought, to rid my mind of its weight. To throw it out in the universe and clear my head. I think that is the best description of how it feels.

I know this is a short blog post, but it’s an example. I needed to get this out.

It has been expelled.